Desi Rep shimmering with Hindu Myth: Star Daughter Book Review

We stan diverse books!! Hellu everyone! I chanced upon Star Daughter by some cosmic luck and immediately added it to my Goodreads To Be Read pile. A Desi rep, Indian inspired fantasy with Hindu Mythology (sucker for Percy Jackson-Greek Mythologies and my Dadi’s night time stories 🤩) and magic and a high stakes competition ? SIGN. ME. UP!

Let’s see how it fared for me. 😉

Name: Star Daughter
Author: Shveta Thakrar
Pages: 448
Publisher: HarperTeen

The daughter of a star and a mortal, Sheetal is used to keeping secrets. Pretending to be “normal.” But when an accidental flare of her starfire puts her human father in the hospital, Sheetal needs a full star’s help to heal him. A star like her mother, who returned to the sky long ago.

Sheetal’s quest to save her father will take her to a celestial court of shining wonders and dark shadows, where she must take the stage as her family’s champion in a competition to decide the next ruling house of the heavens–and win, or risk never returning to Earth at all.

This gorgeously imagined YA debut blends shades of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and a breathtaking landscape of Hindu mythology into a radiant contemporary fantasy.

My Review

⭐⭐⭐.5

India is so vast and diverse in itself, with varied cultures and people, speaking different languages and celebrating different festivals that it’s difficult to show it in its entirety and represent it in just one book.

So when someone says #ownvoices in Indian sense, I’m all for it but when I read it, I spot one cultural aspect here and another elsewhere; it basically intermingles. Now, I’m not pointing it out as a negative aspect; just an observation. But food is one of those things which I think really ties it all together and this book has really delicious food descriptions and no “Naan bread” mentions 🤣.

Sheetal, a half mortal and a half star, has always kept her latter identity hidden from the world, except from her aunt and best friend, Minal. The star song flows in her veins but she can’t give into it, lest she loses control and hurts herself or someone else. She can have a unique effect on people though, i.e., she can inspire them from a creative perspective.

When Sheetal ends up accidentally mortally harming her father, she turns to the heavens or Svarglok, where her mother resides and has to take part in a talent competition of sorts and win so she can go back to earth with a little something which obviously I can’t reveal and save her father.

The writing is beautiful and quite poetic but comes off as overly embellished at times. The world building is quite magnificent, taking the Nakshatra and Hindu Gods and mythological creatures like apsaras and other customs and traditions interwoven into the story and the Night Market 🙌🏻. I especially loved the market, resembling an Indian market of sorts with the hodgepodge of a variety of goods being sold there.

Sheetal is a good flawed character and comes of quite real, considering she’s a star. She has to take some difficult decisions by virtue of her birth and being put into an anxiety inducing situation like you know, maybe killing her father, taking part in a high stakes celestial competition and what not 😂 but at times she came across as very annoying, especially when it involved her love interest, Dev and this was one aspect I totally disliked! I love a good romance but this teenage pinning and continuous fantasizing kissing a guy who sorta hurt her, just got on my nerves 🤷🏻‍♀️.

Even though the world was great and the descriptions of food were *chef’s kiss*, I found the characters to be lacking in their personality in a way that were not fully fleshed out.
What I really liked was Minal and her friendship with Sheetal, like you know going to heaven from earth for each other and covering for her 🌚. She was so positive, headstrong, sassy and provided that comic relief and frankly speaking, I enjoyed her romantic angle more and would’ve loved to explore it further.

There are a few plot twists but most of them fell quite flat for me and frankly speaking, I didn’t get thier point as such. The desperation of the characters also lacked quite a bit like show this is a high stakes competition; show that desperation and show you want the crown! Apart from that, the court politics was quite nice and explained quite well but again, stakes felt a little low as compared to how they were made to sound 🙊.

All in all, this was a decent fantasy debut with all the modern Desi-ness and Hindu mythology aspect, with nosy aunts and overly protective Indian families, mentions of mouthwatering Indian food and instruments and what greed to make a name for oneself can do to you. Also, kids, don’t get addicted to drugs, especially the performance enhancing ones. I just wish instead of being so slow paced and being rushed at the end, it was paced out evenly and the characters were more developed and some of them maybe *whispers* lessannoying 🙊. I would have loved to see more of the Night Market and life in Svarglok 😍.

Have you read the book? What did you think? Do you plan to? If you do, check it out here 🙂

Until next time, bye!